There are plenty of valid reasons for not wanting your online activity and information to be packaged up for anyone who wishes to “follow” you. Many people who use one or more of Google’s services never intended for, say, their Google Reader information to be connected to their e-mail addresses. Some of them need to keep that information unlinked so that, for example, abusive ex-husbands and threatening strangers can’t find new ways to torment them.

It’s easy to believe that open access to personal information is mostly harmless, and that stalkers only harass drama queens and women who “put themselves” in dangerous relationships offline. It may be especially easy to believe this if your worst communication experiences online have involved flamewars and nasty emails.

Here’s the thing. I’m using Google Buzz, albeit carefully and tentatively, but a year ago, I wouldn’t have been doing so.

For a long time, I kept my online identities as fragmented as possible to make it harder for strangers (or the wrong acquaintances) to physically find me in non-public venues, or to see what I was posting under other names. Why? Because when I was an undergraduate ten years ago, two men with whom I did not want contact found me—found my dorm and room number and supposedly private unlisted telephone number. This information was “confidential,” but that didn’t keep me from getting surprise calls late at night, including one from an unstable young man I had known briefly in high school who happened to believe that I was causing him to be spiritually attacked by demons, and who now knew exactly where I lived.

Those calls—demonstrations that people who did not have my best interest in mind wanted and could easily obtain my personal information—shaped my online habits.

About a year ago, I realized that by speaking at various conferences, I had already left a trail for anyone who cared to bother me. So I stopped asking people to remove my last name from the captions of photos posted online. I let my anonymous accounts drift toward my identifiable ones. I started to publicly talk about travel plans. The fact that I’m approaching my mid-thirties and have been in a committed relationship for ten years has shielded me from a lot of random harassment, but I remember what it felt like to be so vulnerable.

It’s unconscionable for Google to connect up disparate accounts and circles of online activity that happen to be associated with a Gmail address by default. It is even less acceptable that they have provided such inadequate ways of opting out, aside of deleting all information associated with any Google product or service or any product or service they eventually acquire. But most Gmail users won’t object, because they’re used to having their privacy treated as a non-issue by the companies with whom they trust their information. Nevertheless, it’s wrong. And for some people, especially for young women, sexual and ethnic minorities, activists, and anyone engaged in controversial communication online, it’s dangerous.

"Google Buzz Screws Up" was published on February 12th, 2010 and is listed in Blog.

Absolutely 100% spot-on. Buzz is an unqualified disaster on this front. Even if I use it, I’m hesitant to add contacts for fear of revealing information about them to third parties. (If I turn it off, am I opting out? etc etc etc) And I’m probably wrong about precisely how it works, but it’s so poorly designed and implemented I can’t easily find that out. Now as a user I’m forced to go on a fishing expedition, wasting my time researching settings to shut off this solution to a problem I never asked for.

Google needs to wake up to the fact that “Don’t be evil” isn’t accomplished through intention alone, but through the actual (and perceived) impact of their actions in the real world. That they’re surprised by this audience reaction speaks volumes about where they’re heading as a company.

http://jennlukas.com Jenn Lukas

Excellent points – For a long time I was fine with my online presence – and never had any unfortunate stories worth telling. But then as more social avenues (MySpace, Facebook and now Buzz) have opened up – so has a larger demographic of people I know from outside my web-based work. This has caused me to re-evaluate a lot of settings and arenas I once didn’t think twice about – as a new awareness of protecting myself from, as well as appealing to in some case, different audiences has become a lot more dominant in my everyday internet usage.

Here’s one more to figure out a stand on.

http://inhab.it Wil

Thank you. It’s been a strange week as people I used to email begin to comment on things I share on reader, and people I do not know in any capacity respond to things that, while previously public, had not previously been *pushed to their inbox*.

The fact that Google is not aware that there is a difference between those latter two disturbs me.

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